Music: Mainly instrumental light rock
Length: 47 minutes. 12 min. motion warmup w/ almost no static stretches, 23 minutes of dance including a 3 min "cooldown" dance (YMCA), 2 min. of standing & floor-based stretching, 10 minutes of very fast floor ab workouts, a little final, floor-based static stretching.
Energy Level: very, very high from start to finish
Choreography: complex (if you've got two left feet)
Production: MTV-like production quality

I really should have known better, but I like Abdul so I decided to give it a shot. There is no way to do this tape slow so be sure you've got loads of energy. Abdul opens with the statement that she picked some people up off the street and that even those with two left feet can do the tape. Hah! She's never met anybody with two left feet. The opening "warmup", and I use that word advisedly, includes some neck snapping that should make orthopedic surgeons salivate and one-legged standing stretches (you stand on one foot and hold the other leg which is bent at a 90 degree angle) which Abdul and the others do without comment and perfect stability.

To give her some credit, her teaching method is pretty good. She runs through a step "slowly" a couple of times, does it to tempo, teaches another step the same way, adds it to the first step, then adds a third step, then combines the three. There are three sets of three steps and the last part of the main routine consists of two sets of all nine steps. Unfortunately, there is no visual or other cueing to the start of a new step so it's very hard to fast forward the tape to practice a step outside of your aerobic time, and you'll have to if you're not a natural or trained dancer and want to learn the routines. There are several steps that are murder on the knees and for which there is no low-impact alternative---and I wouldn't try this on a thick carpet. Worse, the camera has an unerring tendency to move to Abdul's face or overhead or at the back of the floor just when you're trying to figure out which leg to start with. (Disco Workout and Lean Routine have the same kind of MTV camera-work that is counter-productive when you're trying to learn how to do something.)

The music is fun, Abdul is infectious and generally gives good cues, and it is possible to learn the dance (or some facsimile thereof). If any dancers are reading this, you will probably get bored quickly by the "teaching" aspect of the routines. If she had included a section at the end with slow versions of all the steps, or if there were visual cues, it would work better for those of us who really do have two left feet. The tape ends with a series of aerobic ab exercises that will give you a real workout.

Diane Danielle